Summary:

Siteground was founded on the premise of offering high-quality, premium hosting for web businesses and high-traffic sites. They claim to have best-in-class technology and the fastest servers in the hosting business, but can these claims be backed up or are they just continuing the unfortunate industry trend of boasting about something they don’t necessarily have?

Lots of hosting providers claim to have the best and fastest technology in the business, but Siteground was easily one of the fastest and most stable providers we have reviewed.

With no EIG-affiliation (yet, fingers crossed!), Siteground is a great beginner web host for new startups and existing businesses alike, combining high performance with excellent support, albeit at a relatively higher cost.

So, could Siteground be good for your website? Keep reading to see if they might be the right fit for you!

Siteground Plans / Pricing

Siteground operates in a similar way to A Small Orange (read our review of ASO) where they don’t offer unlimited bandwidth plans, instead offering plans meant for however many visitors your website attracts a month.

This can be a positive situation, as for example you won’t get hit by hidden charges with unknown or well-hidden bandwidth limits (such as GoDaddy or HostGator), but it can also create some confusion and problems as well.

Siteground also operates slightly differently when it comes to payment options. Along with the usual month to month or term billing system, Siteground offers the opportunity to start off a 1-month trial for $3.95 with a setup fee of $12.

While that $12 setup fee might be enough to turn you off, Siteground offers numerous additional features with even their basic StartUp plan. Included in all plans is a free domain name, free setup and transfer, daily backups, and Cloudflare CDN.

For the GrowBig and GoGeek plans, there is also “premium” support, a free SSL certificate and the use of Siteground’s “SuperCacher” technology.

VPS solutions are also available, with completely scalable options (even including the option to make your own plan!) and powerful hardware, Siteground is an excellent option for managed cloud hosting.

Siteground offers dedicated servers for those with greater needs than shared hosting or a VPS, with data center locations in the U.S, Europe and Asia.

Siteground Customer Service

Siteground prides itself on its customer service and they justify some of their higher prices by claiming to provide the best customer service in the hosting business.

We find it hard to argue with them, as both our live chat and telephone tests were extremely quick and informative, a refreshing change from constantly being transferred to others and sent to FAQ sites and forums.

Our live chat session was exceptionally quick and professional, with our wait time being less than a minute (even though there were 19 people ahead of us) on a weekday morning! The rep was very knowledgeable and friendly in answering our test question, and we really liked that the chat window lets you know how exactly how many people are in line ahead of you.

Our telephone session was also similarly enjoyable and effortless, as we were connected to a rep in just a few minutes on a weekday morning, who also answered our CPanel-related question quickly and skillfully.

With Siteground’s strong emphasis on customer service, it comes as little surprise to us that our experiences with them were excellent.

Siteground Speed / Reliability

Siteground has a reputation for offering some of the most stable and well-preforming servers for your web-hosting needs. While they do charge higher prices than most competitors, they also give you a peaceful state of mind with well-constructed and well-maintained hardware.

Siteground also has an interesting hardware upgrade policy where if there is more advanced hardware available, they will upgrade all servers in their data center. This is good to hear as most companies either simply partially upgrade their infrastructure or only update the high-tiered servers.

Siteground follows the industry-wide standard of advertising 99.9% uptime, so we decided to check with our friends over at Cloud Spectator to see if they agreed with that statement. Unfortunately, CS does not track shared hosting for Siteground, but they do track Siteground’s managed WordPress service. With 99.8% uptime for managed WordPress sites, Siteground more or less reaches their advertised percentage.

It goes without saying that page load times are extremely important to the success of a website. The industry standard is usually around 2-3 seconds, as this is about the amount of time someone will wait for your page to load before clicking elsewhere. Luckily, Siteground has great page load times as our average page load time of around 1.5 seconds proved. We tested loading a 3 MB web page using Pingdom’s speed test service and were pleasantly surprised by the 1.47s load time!

Siteground Security

Keeping your site safe is another key focus of Siteground and they do not disappoint by having numerous security features available for your site.

In addition to compliance with PCI DSS (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard), Siteground also handles also security risks and issues with their own security department. This means that instead of waiting for some external security company to come out with a patch, Siteground will start working on their own custom fix from the minute the problem begins.

Siteground has data centers in Chicago, London, Amsterdam, and Singapore, meaning that they have great geographical options to ensure your visitors have the fastest connection to your website. These data centers are well-protected and maintained, with high-level electricity redundancy present in all facilities.

Siteground also provides password protected directories, IP blocking, and leech protection. These are all easily accessible from the main CPanel interface of your Siteground site.

Siteground Interface

Siteground uses a simple and sleek version of CPanel for their shared hosting plans, much like Bluehost. We were very pleased with its usability and how it isn’t littered with upsells and advertisements.

Accessing e-mail, FTP, and other services are just a click away while backups are easy to manage from the main interface as well. One click installs using Softaculous are also readily available, meaning you can have your site setup and ready to go in just a few minutes! Extra services such as Dedicated IPs, SSL certificates and others are also available.

We also really like that they have a variety of FAQ guides related to setting up your website. These guides are highly informative, yet easy to understand for newcomers to hosting.

Siteground Hosting Conclusion

For a company that advertises itself as a premium hosting provider, we found that Siteground hits the nail on the head when it comes to offering a high-quality hosting solution.

Excellent customer service, custom network infrastructure and reliable servers are just some of the benefits of hosting your website with Siteground. With slightly higher prices than other competitors (GoDaddy, HostGator, iPage), they are not for everyone, but rather for those with a slightly bigger budget and “premium” demands.

With a 30- day money back guarantee, feel free to check them out and let us know what you think!

Written by Thomas UjjThomas Ujj is an expat/traveler and IT enthusiast with a passion for IT security and privacy. When he isn’t planning his next trip, he likes to take time to practice his Italian cooking as well as religiously watching Italian football team AS Roma.